Abstract

Purpose - In hotel industry, quality of leader-member exchange(LMX) relationship is very critical, because it impacts on the employee's work attitude and behaviors. Thus, this research examines the effect of LMX on employee loyalty in the context of hotel business and identifies mediating roles of work stressors, work role performance in the relationship between LMX and employee loyalty. This research suggests the guidelines for how hotel leaders should manage their employees and build employee loyalty that improve management and business performance. Research design, data, and methodology - This study tests the structural relationship between LMX, work stressors, work role performance, and employee loyalty. Work role performance divide into three sub-dimensions such as individual task proficiency, individual task adaptivity, and individual task proactivity. In order to examine the purposes of this research, research model and hypotheses were developed. All constructs were measured with multiple items developed and tested in the previous studies. The data were collected from 113 franchise hotel employees and were analyzed using SPSS 22.0 and SmartPLS 3 program. Result - The findings of this research are as follows. First, leader-member exchange(LMX) have significant positive impacts on work stressors, work role performance, and employee loyalty. Second, work stressors have significant negative impacts on work role performance and employee loyalty. Third, work role performance has significant positive impact on employee loyalty. Conclusions - The outcomes of this research indicate that hotel leaders should focus on the dyadic relationship with their employees how to improve employee productivity through LMX relationship. In turn, the quality of this relationship influences employees's work attitudes and behaviors. As a result of increasing job demands in hotel business which relies heavily on human resources, the hotel leader must find ways to prevent or reduce stressors and associated strains. If hotel employees perceive the high quality of LMX relationship, they improve their work role performance which influences loyalty. Therefore, the hotel leaders should develop monetary or non-monetary reward system for the employees and, make an efforts to have unique social exchange relationships with employees.